The story of my rape

As a student backpacking in Italy, Mary Beard was raped by a stranger on a night train. For more than 20 years she has been retelling the incident - to herself, as much as to other people - in an attempt to make sense of it

In September 1978, on a night train from Milan, I was forced to have sex with an architect on his way to the site of a biscuit factory he was designing somewhere outside Naples (or so he claimed).

It's a simple enough story. I was a graduate student, changing trains at Milan, and laden with luggage for a term's research in Rome. There were a couple of hours to wait for the most convenient train south, so I went to the station bar on the lookout, I suppose, for an opportunity to wheel out my still very faltering Italian. The architect was there, on the lookout too, presumably. Discovering that I had no couchette for the journey, he insisted on trying to book one for me; he took my ticket (which I meekly gave him), returned triumphant and then helped me with my cases and backpack to the train. Predictably enough, as it now seems (though I'm sure I didn't foresee it at the time), what he had actually booked was a two-berth first-class wagon-lit. He bundled me in, took off my clothes and had sex, before departing to the upper bunk. I woke a few hours later just outside Rome to find him on top of me again, humping away - taking his last chance before handing me over to the sleeping-car steward to be deposited on the platform, while he no doubt slept on to Naples.

The only face I have chosen to remember (or perhaps recreate) from the whole incident belongs to this steward, the sly and uncomfortably knowing face of a man who had recognised exactly what was going on and had seen it all before, many times. As he pressed a small plastic cup of coffee into my hand in a routine way, I could tell that it would have been useless appealing to him for help, even if I'd had the chance.

To all intents and purposes this was rape. I did not want to have sex with the man and had certainly not given consent. If I appeared to be compliant, it was because I had no option: I was in a foreign city, with enough of the local language to ask directions to the cathedral maybe, but not to search out a reliable protector and explain convincingly what was happening.

If no violence was used, it was because the man's weapon was my own tiredness (a mind set on sleep, rather than watching for the telltale signs of danger) and the luggage. With two heavy cases and a backpack, I couldn't make a dash for it. Nor could I just abandon a couple of pieces: never mind the clothes; I had spread my precious thesis and all the notes carefully through the different cases (a misplaced faith in the eggs-in-one-basket caveat, as it turned out).

That said, I can't claim to have been particularly traumatised by what happened. I suffered no subsequent aversion to late-night trains, foreign railway stations or even Neapolitan biscuits; and I would give my eyeteeth to be able to zoom around Europe in a first-class wagon-lit - something I haven't been able to afford since.

Instead, I nursed some strange and oddly misplaced grudges. One was against the funding council that was sponsoring my research; for had they not insisted, I reasoned, on my using the cheapest method of transport (at that time, a train), and allowed me to go by plane instead, none of this would have happened. Another was against the friend who had been going to travel with me - even though it was I who had changed my plans and had come on later. Another was against the biscuit-factory man himself, not so much for what he did, but for doing it twice. Even now, more than 20 years later, I can still rage at the memory of waking up to find him doing it again.

If all this suggests that I'm letting my rapist off comparatively lightly, that is partly because in the intervening years the retelling of this story (to myself as much as to other people) has generated quite other interpretations of what went on, which coexist - and compete - with the account I've just given.

The first of these is the predictable slide from "rape" to "seduction": I wasn't overpowered or coerced; whatever happened in the station bar, it amounted to "persuasion" or to an exercise of choice on my part. In fact, something like that was the first euphemistic version I chose to tell my friends on arriving in Rome: I had, I complained, been "picked up" in Milan and ended up in bed with the guy on the train; I never mentioned the word "rape".

But I have also caught myself making sense of the whole incident as a much more emphatically willed part of my sexual history: the perfect degree-zero sexual encounter between complete strangers, happening in no single place but on the move, in the more or less exotic (or at least cinematically resonant) location of a wagon-lit.

In this version, any seduction was done - however inadvertently - by me; the triumph was my own. In pointing to this ambivalence in my responses, I'm not intending to condone the rapist, nor to weaken the case for seeing rape in general as a crime of male violence and male power over women. I'm also well aware that I got off extremely lightly, and that there are many victims of rape for whom an "ambivalent response" would be an undreamed-of luxury. (I can see, conversely, that my alternative versions of this encounter could so easily be interpreted as classic exercises of denial, or refusal to face the rape as rape.)

What I am trying to highlight is the crucial importance, both culturally and personally, of rape narratives. For rape is always a (contested) story, as well as an event; and it is through the telling of rape-as-story, in its different versions, its shifting nuances, that cultures have always debated most intensely some of the unfathomable conflicts of sexual relations and sexual identity.

The tale of the rape of Lucretia, for example, is hardly tellable - as many Roman writers themselves discovered - without raising the question of where seduction ends and rape begins; the rape of the Sabines puts a similar question mark over the distinction between rape and marriage. In fact, almost every narrative of sexual coercion (including my own) forces its teller to confront the question of sex as something women do, or something they have done to them; and of how a slightly different spin on the rape story can lead to an entirely different answer.

Narratives also take much longer in the telling than the event itself. It is now a truism of feminist sociology that the courtroom testimony of the rape victim amounts to a replay of the rape; a re-rape. But it doesn't stop there. The fact that I have taken care to recall my own relatively harmless encounter with sexual coercion more than 20 years ago is not so much to do with its unforgettable trauma, but with the psychic and ideological function that remembering the event still fulfils.

I may well be a bad judge of what that function is; but my sense is that the narrative was not only a useful way of understanding my own post-adolescent sexual experience at the time (what exactly was I doing?), but has been an important focus for rethinking that experience from the perspective now of motherhood and middle age. The same must be true for hundreds of thousands of women with equally tawdry, everyday stories of sexual coercion to tell. Remembering rape is about making sense of sex.

 Dr Mary Beard is a reader in classics at Newnham college, Cambridge. This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in the London Review of Books.To subscribe to the LRB call 020-7209 1141